Lednice–Valtice Cultural Landscape

Spanning 283.09 square kilometers in the Czech Republic’s South Moravian Region, the Lednice–Valtice Cultural Landscape includes the towns of Lednice, Valtice, and Hlohovec. In 1996, UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage site, citing its unusual blend of Baroque, Neoclassical, and neo-Gothic architecture, and the fact that a single family deliberately shaped the entire landscape over centuries. It also falls within the Lower Morava Biosphere Reserve, parts of which UNESCO had recognized years earlier.

History

Valtice Castle first expanded in the Gothic style during the early 1200s, but the Hussite Wars badly damaged it. Later, Prince Karl Eusebius of Liechtenstein rebuilt it in the Baroque style. Lednice (formerly called Eisgrub) started as a fortified manor in the 1300s; from 1680 it grew into a palace, and between 1846 and 1858 Prince Aloys II redesigned it in a Tudor Gothic Revival style, then known as “Old English style.”

17th–19th centuries

From the 17th through the 20th centuries, the Princes of Liechtenstein turned their properties at Feldsberg (Valtice) and Eisgrub (Lednice) into one large, designed private park. In the 1800s, they continued reshaping the area as an English-style landscape park.

Feldsberg belonged to Austria until 1919, while Eisgrub was part of the Kingdom of Bohemia—both under Habsburg rule within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Austrian-Bohemian border actually ran through the park between the two castles. The 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain gave Feldsberg—about 97% German-speaking Lower Austrians in 1910—to Czechoslovakia.

In 1715, a 7-kilometer tree-lined avenue was built; later renamed for poet Petr Bezruč (after his poem “Valčice” describing a journey to Lednice after tasting wine in Valtice), much of it still exists, though both towns have grown and the road no longer directly links the chateaux as originally intended. The Lednice Ponds—Mlýnský, Prostřední, Hlohovecký, and Nesyt—lie between Valtice and the villages of Lednice and Hlohovec. Large parts of the landscape are covered by pine forests called the “Pine-wood” (Boří les), with riparian forests along the Thaya River.